Daily life of a cultivation judge



A certain corner, within the ruins of the Ice Emerald Sect,

"It seems master has already recovered the sarcophagus blood bead he had given that old hag Feng Qiu. tsk, here I thought I'd get to have it.." 

A young man with a guileless look on his face, apricot robes, and black hair neatly tied in a daoist top knot stood within the ruins of the Ice Emerald Sect as his gaze fell toward the center of it.

He gently stretched his hand forward before he quickly pulled it back, with a grimace on his face.

His hand had been burnt to the bone with a sizzling sound that released black smoke constantly produced from his burnt hand.

A red incandescent glow was produced from his bones, and his flesh regrew back.

"What a feisty formation.." he muttered as he warily stared at the ward before him filled with complex runes and white flames moving in between those runes. 

The ward flickered and disappeared as if it was never there. 

The young man stared at the area the ward had appeared for a few more seconds seemingly debating something before he finally shrugged his shoulders in defeat.

"Forget it, it would take considerable expenditure to break it and I doubt the Order would leave anything worthwhile in there anyway. By the look of things, they even cleansed the entire area. Tsk, it's a pity about that bead. I wonder why master treated her so well, despite her being nothing more than a collector..." he turned with his hands behind his back and disappeared like a gust of wind.

....

Within a secret grotto in the southern continent,

A mountain tall enough to blot out the sky filled an entire grotto surrounded by red vapor. The mountain looked like a volcanic mountain, except where there should have been lava overflow, it was deep red liquid, that constantly released fumes in the air slowly trickling down the mountain. 

As the liquid moved down the mountain, red and purple glyphs would constantly flicker from the surface of the black mountain.

The grotto had a red moon above it, and there was no other object in sight except the mountain, however, within that mountain was a different case.

At its caldera, there were piles of corpses that looked to be stewing within the bubbling red blood. The corpses were huge in size an number to the point that they formed mountains of their own within that caldera.

The corpses were of different varieties; there were spirit beasts such as the Ba She which were bigger and released a much more terrifying aura than the one the founder of the Ice Emerald Sect had released when she had transformed. In terms of size and stature, she had lost out completely. Other than the Ba She, there were countless other spirit beasts each more ferocious than the previous from avianic spirit spirit beasts, to reptilian ones, to mammalian ones. There was a massive bear the size of a small hill, its body covered with the black aura of destruction. The air around it trembled and cracked just from its presence. A bird that released the most savage aura that corpses around it would constantly be minced.

However, in terms of disposition, they all paled to five corpses, which even in death, had a majestic air about them. The five corpses were similar, though they varied in color; two were black and three were red.  The three corpses had the shape of a snake, except unlike snakes, their scales carried an ethereal and otherworldly air around them.

Even though they were dead, spiritual qi danced around them almost in joy, while their head, was that of a dragon, and their eyes even dead, radiated with unviolable majesty. They were flood dragons, monsters born with the strength of a palace realm cultivator at birth, and each capable of toppling an entire nation. They could command the winds and the rain with a single swipe of their claws, creatures with the strongest essence of the true dragons.

Based on their monstrous sizes and the half-formed horns the five flood dragons had just reached maturity which meant they all had the strength of a domain expert and a late stage at that, however, here they lay, dead, their bodies slowly being dissolved by the boiling red liquid below them.

In addition, within the pile of corpses, there were human corpses that had their skins dissolved. Their bones released a golden glow and had dao markings on them, which made them shine like precious jade ascendant-grade treasures. The glow and dao markings showed that the corpses belonged to domain experts, and they numbered in the hundreds.

Such a scene would send shockwaves around the continent, as the caldera housed the corpses of terrifying beings able to topple a nation with the palm of their hands and eradicate oceans with another, but they were nothing but food for the boiling red liquid below and in the midst of that harrowing scene was a red shining thorn tree in the center of it.

The red thorn tree was just two meters tall and was filled with millions of palm-sized fruits of different colors. The boiling liquid below it refining the corpses around it seemed to have originated from that tiny tree, and sitting cross-legged beneath was an elderly man with a refined appearance, donning pure black robes.

The elderly man looked to be in his early sixties, white hair smoothly flowing down his back, and irises that burned with blue-black flames. Even with his look, he had lustrous smooth white skin, that made it look like it had been crafted from the purest jade that removed all embellishments and impurities.

Despite being surrounded by enormous corpses that bore enough pressure to create a hole in the earth, the elderly man's presence was accommodating and all-encompassing to the area, as if he could contain an entire world within himself.

However, that same elderly man had four holes in his body, that constantly leaked out golden red blood that had tinges of icy blue air in it. Just a single drop of that blood made the ground below quake in an explosion.

The wounds had an overwhelming and catastrophic energy that could destroy the world surrounding them, which was what prevented the wounds from closing up.

However, despite the severity of the wounds, the elderly man had an indifferent and calm look on his face, seemingly unaffected by it as he held a red thorn in his hand.

"For an upstart, this organization has some rather skilled individuals..."